Winter run chinook may get second home in Battle Creek

By
Steve Schoonover, Chico Enterprise-Record

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Anderson >> State and federal officials are releasing 200,000 young winter-run chinook salmon into the North Fork of Battle Creek over the next two months in an effort to “jump start” a second population of the extremely endangered fish.

Most of the winter-run used to spawn in the upper Sacramento River, Pit River and McCloud River, which have the cold water they need to survive spring and summer so they can spawn in the fall.

That habitat was cut off with the building of Shasta Dam, and those three populations of fish have dwindled to one, which spawns in the less favorable waters of the Sacramento River below Keswick Dam.

The situation is tenuous for those fish, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranking it as one of eight marine species most at risk of extinction. With a single population, the species could be wiped out by a single unfortunate event.

Those fish are entirely dependent of the availability of cold water from deep in Shasta Lake to survive. In the depth of the drought in 2014 and 2015 that cold water wasn’t available and almost all the juvenile salmon spawned in the river died.

In response, a captive breeding program was put into effect at the Livingston Stone Fish Hatchery at the base of Shasta Dam, with a thousand fish raised to adulthood as broodstock to ensure an adequate supply of young fish could be returned to the river.

Then in the wet winter of 2016-17, enough fish were able to breed in the river that the production of the broodstock wasn’t necessary to sustain the population.

That made the Battle Creek option possible.

A second population

The North Fork of Battle Creek is the only stream south of Shasta Dam that did support a population of winter-run chinook. It still could, as its water run cold, with snowmelt from the highlands of Lassen National Volcanic Park and cold springs from the lava terrain around the stream.

However the North Fork is also dammed, albeit with structures smaller than Shasta. The North Fork dams are generally PG&E hydroelectric dams, although the Coleman Fish Hatchery has a weir to divert fish into that facility.

In 1999 the Battle Creek Restoration Project was launched by state and federal wildlife agencies in cooperation with PG&E. The utility found it could remove some of its dams without damaging its profits, and better fish ladders and screens could get fish around those that still made economic sense.

Since then, $100 million has been spent to reopen more than 40 miles of the stream to fish. One dam has already been removed and four more are marked to go. Fish passage has been improved on three more.

In addition, flows in the stream have been allowed to increase from 3 cubic feet per second to 30 to 70 cfs.

Several more months of work remains to be done, but the threatened spring-run chinook have already noticed, and are already making their way up into the new habitat, according to Howard Brown, the Sacramento River Basin branch chief for NOAA Fisheries.

“We didn’t used to have a population there and now we do,” he said during a media call Thursday.

But the winter-run fish haven’t been able to find the stream on their own, officials said.

That’s the idea behind stocking the stream with the unneeded small fish from the Livingston Stone broodstock, to “jump start” a new population in Battle Creek, according to Brett Galyean with the Coleman Fish Hatchery.

The small fish were moved from Livingston Stone to Coleman last October, and those are the ones being released now.

“Battle Creek has long been recognized as an ideal resource for cold water from snow melt,” said Doug Killam, a senior environmental scientist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It’s kind of a jewel of the system.”

If the second population of winter-run takes hold in Battle Creek, the species’ chances of survival increase.